The Мoon is shrinking, causing surface creases and shocks underneath it, AFP writes. Data is from the NASA spacecraft Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which flies through an elliptical trajectory between 20 and 160 kilometers above the Moon’s surface and takes pictures and other measurements. advertisement A survey of more than 12,000 images indicates that one of the basin at the North Pole of the Moon, considered geologically dead, actually cracks and moves. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no tectonic plates and the only activity is noticeable because of the slow heat loss since it was formed 4.5 billion years...
More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else? For decades, scientific investigation failed to yield much light and relied more on imagination than the facts. However research over the last half century has begun to reveal its secrets. The machine dates from around the end of the 2nd century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism...
The rivers on Mars were wider and deeper than those on Earth, according to a publication in the Science Advances Magazine. Up to this conclusion, scientists reached an analysis of 200 dry river beds on the surface of the neighboring planet. Wide and deep rivers have existed on Mars for a surprisingly long period. This makes their disappearance even more mysterious and inexplicable. “We could not explain why there were lakes and rivers on Mars, and the current discoveries make the question even more incomprehensible” writes Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago. ”It turns out that wide and deep...
Get ready for one of the greatest scientific news of the century. It seems astronomers will soon be showing the first shot of a black hole. Event Horizon Telescope participants (including a series of telescopes from around the world) have scheduled a number of press conferences around the world on April 10 to make announcement about “a groundbreaking result”. So far, the details are unknown. We can assume, however, that these are the first results of their mission to capture for the first time the event horizon of a black hole. The black hole is a space-time area that has...
The concept of “day” is so obvious to us, people, that we often get surprised when we realize that the length of the day on other planets can be quite different than here on Earth. Perhaps even more shocking thing is, that so far we did’t know how long is a day on Saturn. Thanks to data collected from the Cassini mission, we have an answer to this long-standing mystery. Saturn spins around its axis for 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds. The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal. Planetary scientists often use magnetic fields to determine the...
British and American scientists have proved that billions of years ago the Earth resembled the modern Titan, a satellite of Saturn with an atmosphere and vast seas, high mountains, rivers, dunes, mists. Everything is like Earth’s, but with one difference: the temperature of Saturn’s largest satellite is minus 180 degrees, and rivers and oceans contain hydrocarbons. The results of their research were published in the new issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to scientists, 2.4 billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere, like Titan’s, contained huge amounts of methane – a gas produced by microorganisms, the...
Imagine that you can get the energy from every star in a radius of 100 million light-years. Of thousands of galaxies, each of which has billions of stars. Try to imagine that you are capable of taking this kind of energy and using it in the greatest super weapon in the universe. The ruin you will cause is unimaginable. In fact, you do not have to imagine it, because all of this already exists in the form of gamma rays. What are these “space snipers” that shoot the Universe at random intervals. What happens if they hit us? Another interesting...
Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang. Two leading theories propose to explain the direction of time by way of the relatively uniform conditions of the Big Bang. At the very start, what is now the universe was homogeneously hot, so much so that matter didn’t really...
Our home galaxy is not the thin, clean spiral we had envisioned. Researchers created the first 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy and figured out what makes it warped and twisted. So, we now know that the Milky Way isn’t flat. Scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia have published a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing an unprecedented 3D map of the galaxy we live in. The scientists used the locations of 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the outline of the Milky Way galaxy called Classical Cepheids....
